a quick, off the top of my head, and perhaps precipitous response to the question of morally ambiguous females in CHC seems to me apparent that to the extent that classical hollywood was really ABOUT men they would be the ones who were shaded, whether morally or otherwise . . . and since women mattered mainly as functions of the stopry of the male lead they would be drawn more schematically . . . . . . but when i think back to films of the forties and fities that were not ABOUT men--or at least not ONLY about men--i find moral shading as common in women characters as in their male counterparts . . . . . . think of an assortment of k hepburn or i dunne films . . . in fact i suspect that an equivalence of moral definition/ambiguity would have to be central to romantic comedy as a genre . . . . . . and of course in hitchcock the morally ambiguous woman is the defining figure . . . daisy in lodger, alice in blackmail, marion in psycho, judy [NOT madeleine] in vertigo, to choose a few more or less at random . . . and most dramatically and even emblematically, young charlie in SOAD . . . so i'm a little suspicious of the agenda here but eager to see how it develops mike frank [[log in to unmask]] ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]